March 9th–17th

PyCon 2011: Live on Startup Row

7th March 2011
by Van Lindberg

We had a torrent of interest when we announced Startup Row for PyCon 2011. At that time, we only had six or seven companies to start. Well, due to the immense interest, we are happy to announce the final slate of entrants for Startup Row at PyCon 2011 - fifteen different startups that are making it happen with Python.

It is worth quoting just a little from the original post introducing Startup Row:

"""Since the beginning, Python has always been strongly associated with
startups and entrepreneurs.... For Startup Row, we wanted to look toward the future - companies that
are just starting today, but may become household names in the future."""

The founders of these companies will be at PyCon for the mail conference days, and
for one day they will be participating in the Expo Hall. The other days they will be participating at
PyCon with everyone else, so look around - the person next to you may have just
started a company.

So without further ado, here are the fifteen Startup Row Finalists:

Friday

CollectorDASH: One of the things that make us unique is that we collect things - stamps, dishes, pennies, blue glass vases, art, everything. This is a vibrant part of our culture, but the tools to empower collectors are stuck back in the last century. CollectorDASH builds applications and marketplaces for collectors, applying modern technologies to make collecting more efficient, fun and affordable.

CrowdBooster: Everything is social
these days - and Twitter is the fastest-moving social platform of all.
Crowdbooster gives you twitter analytics that let you understand
who is talking about you in real time.

Stormpulse: Are you tired of watching the news only to find out where a thunderstorm was 20 minutes ago? It is especially important to have up-to-date information if your business depends on the weather. Stormpulse delivers high-fidelity weather intelligence to a broad range of industries including energy, manufacturing, transportation, defense, healthcare, and retail. Businesses and government agencies subscribe to this intelligence to improve their long-range planning and daily decision-making surrounding the arrival and impact of significant weather events in the continental United States and Caribbean.

AppNest: AppNest is a distribution platform for mobile applications. Specifically, they are making the installation of private applications really simple. Ad-hoc distribution is the current technique used by iOS developers - but the publication and distribution process for ad-hoc applications is byzantine and difficult. AppNest makes this process a lot simpler. With AppNest, users can install the application using nothing more than a web browser and a native iOS application. No iTunes required, everything can be done on the mobile device.

Saaspire: Saaspire is building a suite of products based around "behavioral data": the data that you create when you say or do things on the Internet. Saaspire is launching their first product, FocusLab, right now. It's a behavioral data analysis tool. They are also rolling out a SaaS platform that will allow developers to easily add personalization and other behavioral data services to their apps.

Olark: One of the most frustrating things
for any business is having people come into your store, put items in their carts,
and then... leave. Olark helps businesses engage with customers before they
leave the site, increasing the numbers of visitors that become customers.

Ep.io: Ep.io is a smart Python hosting platform. Not only do they take care of
your load balancing, database configuration, redundancy, backups and
code pushes for you, they support any WSGI-compatable framework or
application, and any Python library we can install from PyPi. By running things in their secure, shared environment, they can
keep costs down. Within their free resource limits, if you have a
small site you just want people to see, just throw it up - a few
minutes, and it'll be up and running at no cost. Above that, they bill you only by
the amount of resources you actually use.

Saturday

DotCloud: DotCloud takes
Platform-as-a-Service to the next level by allowing you to choose your
/own/ platform that will be supported by DotCloud. DotCloud allows
developers to be developers and not system administrators. DotCloud has recently received 800K in Angel Funding and is growing like mad.

Mailgun: Email is an essential part of
doing business today - but building proper email interfaces can be
tricky and error-prone. Mailgun provides an email interface for your
app, allowing you to integrate email into your existing processes in a
simple and easy way.

Glancely: Just one look at Glancely
and you get it - instant product search. Not thousands of clicks
through various confusing catalogs - just see what you want, click
it, its yours.

NodeRabbit: NodeRabbit is all about
it easier to build and deploy web applications. Our first product is
DjangoZoom, a Heroku-like platform-as-a-service that radically speeds up the
deployment of Django apps. Early adopters have described DjangoZoom as
"magical" and a service that they can't live without.

ACL Systems: ACL Systems is a new startup focusing on the next wave in education - online education. For some aspects of education, there is nothing like being in class with a teacher. For everything else, the cost and availability advantages of online education are disrupting this established business. ACL System's online education platform makes online education effective and affordable.

MBA Sciences: MBA Sciences is a self-funded startup focused on allowing programmers to
exploit parallelism and rapidly create scalable, fault-tolerant distributed applications that are rock solid from day one. MBA Sciences was
highlighted by the Supercomputing 2010 Conference as a Disruptive Technology due to the ability of SPM.Python to perform the non-differentiating heavy lifting by removing the pain typically associated with authoring, testing and maintaining parallel capabilities.

Eldarion: Eldarion builds and runs great websites like Quisition and Typewar and helps you do the same. They get you from idea to launch sooner by developing custom and open source components for Django/Pinax and providing hosting on the Gondor platform.

Beautylish: Beauty products is not where you would necessarily expect to find Python - but it is there. Beautylish is a social network for beauty, cosmetics, and brands. They focus on video tutorials, candid product reviews, and conversations amongst users. The service actually launched in beta form this past January, and has already accumulated a small but loyal user base. They have already raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of prominent angel investors, including Ron Conway's SV Angel.